THE PROBLEM OF PORNOGRAPHY
Elliott, George P. & Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs & Spitz, David & Abel, Lionel & Howe, Irving & Hausknecht, Murray & Hausknecht, Murray
The following articles are based on a recent discussion among our editors, led by Murray Hausknecht, on the topic of pornography in our society and the ensuing problems of social and cultural...
...Go to the porn movie but don't oblige me to look at its stills just because I'm walking by...
...But very few works of art in any era have had significant historical effects (as opposed to idiosyncratic effects on individuals...
...Furthermore, pornography has sometimes been used as an instrument of didactic purpose: Sade...
...It is precisely at this point that Elliott, op...
...This accounts for the common and seemingly paradoxical reaction to porno movies—that they are sexually arousing and boring...
...Or, to put the same point differently, books like Uncle Tom's Cabin owe their influence less to their quality as works of art than their intent to instruct and persuade...
...Men and women of worth would obviously refuse such an assignment as tedious and unpleasant, and as an immense forfeiture of time and of their own studies...
...The Hustler prosecution and that of the actors by district attorneys on the political make also indicate that traditional civil liberties problems have by no means been completely settled...
...In short, erotic writing is work that tries to achieve the traditional end of art...
...Still, the thought must haunt one: Suppose we go "all the way" (how does one do that...
...I can think of some right off: restrictions on cars that use large quantities of gasoline, tomatoes that are gassed to ripeness, possession of guns, littering, cigarette advertising, and the playing of transistor radios on public beaches...
...No doubt, many functions were served by men gathering in this fashion...
...Irving Howe My response to pornography is not so much to be socially alarmed as imaginatively disheartened...
...The arguments about pornography and its effects apply only to adults and not to children...
...Elliott incorrectly assumes that I deny the intent is present...
...Although outrage must command due respect—it is, after all, a sign of moral commitment—it tends to provoke an impatience that overrrules our customary good sense...
...A contemporary Spanish radical, Tierno Gavan, has written movingly on the trivialization of life in modern times, noting especially the trivializing of the erotic...
...If society is nonexistent in some areas, then, of course, there has to be legal action against pornography, unless we can be reconciled to the horrors of downtown America...
...These are men of sensitivity, of civil libertarian mind, who write and act in their private lives as committed feminists...
...observing the careful distinction drawn by sober thinkers like Murray Hausknecht between "erotica" and "pornography" and employing standards that yield clarity of meaning and ease of administration rather than extensive and bewildering judicial wrangling...
...Censorship, says Abel, is required, because now "social opinion lacks force" and "society is nonexistent in some areas...
...There are many like Mr...
...What distinguishes a Robespierre is not his specific beliefs but that he knows what is "contrary to the good of the Republic...
...Only the crudest measures have been used and I question the way the questions have been conceptualized and put...
...Further analyses of the research done for the Commission are reported in a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues...
...besides, it is only one of many free-speech issues and not the determining one...
...some are traditional "slums" while others are "respectable" middle-class areas...
...I don't know if it encourages rape or stimulates perversion...
...The proposal assumes that once the X-rated movie and the material that normally appears in "adult bookshops" are limited to a few sections of the city there will be fewer complaints about pornography and significantly less demand for complete censorship...
...However, as an artist I note that nearly all artists, in nearly all ages and countries, have worked under social restrictions of varying intensity, some of these in the form of overt censorship laws, and that occasionally these very prohibitions inform the work of art, sometimes to its advantage...
...In addition, none of the "experimental" studies assessed the long-range effects of pornography, and, for obvious reasons, no studies involved children...
...7 "Freedom, Virtue and the New Scholasticism," Commentary, October 1959, p. 314...
...Zoning would still leave us with the "moral ugliness" of pornography, but in an imperfect world that is preferable to the certainties imposed on us by a Robespierre...
...Molly, go ahead now...
...Dostoevsky, Dickens, Shaw, Brecht, Pound —they are never didactic in intent and effect...
...When we identify with characters or adopt attitudes toward them we enter their world, and the more we are captured by the created world the greater the possibility that it can affect ideas and beliefs in the real world...
...It is necessary to allow art and artists to perform their traditional function of "dreaming forbidden thoughts, assuming the forbidden stances, and struggling to make sense...
...Somehow any restriction on pornography is symbolic to some of an end to freedom of speech and an end to poetry and beauty...
...Pornography for the individual and not the group causes sex to become an anonymous experience...
...The Robespierre within is encouraged by a moral indignation that often feeds on empty words...
...8 Since it is work like Miller's that has such dire consequences, his novels must have some qualities not found in books filling the racks of "adult bookstores...
...I don't know if it threatens the family...
...I am in favor of sequestering his books, not because they do no harm, but because all that is involved in totally censoring them is likely to do more harm...
...I find fault in their reasoning although I concede they are accurate in part...
...For a walker through Times Square or the downtown areas of many American cities a stop for a newspaper means a confrontation with the tastelessness of Screw and Hustler...
...What the pornographic literature and spectacles in these areas indicate is not at all that certain practices are now socially acceptable, but that society has withdrawn from certain parts of our cities and relinquished these to forces that are either purely commercial or purely criminal...
...Such censors as we would be likely to get would be a constant affront to serious (for I worry not about scurrilous) writers, and could only do more harm than good...
...but still . . . the sheer moral ugliness of the porn scene, the waste and distortion it suggests of human capacity—how can that be reconciled with social hopes...
...Our consolation is the austere one that the alternative to freedom would prove rather more burdensome...
...In the absence of knowing just how much pornography is to blame, but suspecting its impact, I would like to curtail expression of certain kinds of messages that demean and hurt groups of people...
...In reality, some valid works of art contain parts that are simple pornography, and there are many—very many—borderline instances where the categories are most unclear...
...I do not accept the view that the trivialization of sex is something for which we are inescapably destined...
...In one of his "utopian essays" Goodman starts from the premise that the need for pornography is a result of "a general repressive antisexuality" to which censorship contributes...
...He has argued that pornography provides the opportunity for persons to act out sexual needs vicariously or through fantasy that defuses possible antisocial expression...
...However, the Goodmanesque benefits supposed to accrue from removing all restrictions on it seem to me not just dubious, as they seem to Hausknecht, but foolish, since I can't imagine that dirty sex can be freed without also releasing those other things, some of them very dangerous, with which it is involved...
...In addition to these simplifications, Hausknecht weakens his case by what I conceive to be some wrong emphases...
...The recent defeats of ERA, while not wholly a result of the fears and anxieties generated by "the sexual revolution," show how strong this opposition can be...
...6 The virtuous man, the person of good character, is one whose morality and conduct conform to the requirements of nature...
...I also think it would not be too great a denial of freedom of personal expression or art in America to prohibit films indicating that the highest form of sensuality is to hack up your lover as the grande finale of the sex act...
...A zoning ordinance designed to protect residential areas from "adult bookstores" and porno movie houses would restrict them to business and entertainment districts where anonymity has always cloaked the pursuit of anomalous pleasures...
...q David Spitz Only salacious individuals are likely to deny that pornography is a serious problem...
...After exposure there is an increase in coital activity by those with an available sexual partner, but the effect disappears within 48 hours...
...It was not the courtiers of Versailles, but Robespierre, the social radical, who thought the pursuit of sexual pleasures contrary to the good of the Republic...
...This modest proposal implies that here as elsewhere in the life of the society, we must bear the consequences of the beliefs that define us as political beings...
...The conclusion from the liberal premise is that we must go all the way toward removing social restraints upon sexuality, even if many of the immediate consequences are unattractive...
...Our lack of knowledge about its effects on children combined with the plausibility of arguments that they are at greater risk from pornography than adults favor retaining the present restrictions on children's access to it...
...7 One of the difficulties of assessing the argument about the long-run effects is that frequently the necessary distinction between pornography and erotica is not made...
...Every society imposes standards of taste, of morality, and of behavior...
...It is hard to resist crying out, Enough...
...that he confounds "civilization" with his own values...
...It is because the relationship between the artist's intent, his actual work, and its effects remains mysterious that literary criticism prospers...
...But we do not have to be concerned here with what Tierno recommends...
...When confronted with such vacuity it is useful to naively inquire about the Emperor's clothes...
...for example, it is by no means true on the face of it that "censorship more often than not kills what it is ostensibly designed to protect," though a possible argument might hold that this has been true in the parish of history we inhabit, the Enlightened West in which censorship as such has come to be seen by many as an abusive instrument of oppression rather than as an ordinary function of government, subject to abuse of course but not so bad when generally agreed upon...
...All cities have zoning laws that separate, for example, industrial from residential land use...
...The life-enhancing quality of references to sex in Shakespeare and, most especially, in Rabelais can hardly be covered by the terms "pornography" and "obscenity," which properly describe the kind of literary and photographic material regularly published in Hustler and Playboy magazines...
...Indeed, one is then less than human...
...In fact, they judge and censor the use of poor grammar in texts, the 203 behavior they consider inappropriate, and the spread of ideas they consider to be abhorrent...
...Similarly, in some cities pornography will defile public places to a greater extent than in others...
...I find 42nd Street more destructive of my morale as a socialist than all the neoconservative polemics of the last 30 years...
...Get your Hustler in a brown paper wrapper, but don't oblige me to be hustled by it just because there's a newstand round my corner...
...I believe we should censor pornography that insults, defames, and encourages assault on people, men or women...
...Indeed, one colleague assures me that the movies he sees depict an equal enthusiasm by women and men for the satisfaction of erotic pleasures...
...Changes in behavior that are stable and not simply the result of external coercions involve changes in beliefs and attitudes to which we must be persuaded...
...Residents of these neighborhoods, as well as those whose occupations bring them to the center of the city, will be more exposed to the offensiveness of pornography than others...
...to bring a friend is to introduce an element of "relationship," which dilutes or confuses the total porn experience...
...Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, is said to have influenced feelings about slavery, but one must take into account that the novel built on already existing abolitionist sentiment...
...Instead of her forthright "yes," she would as forcefully have repeated "no...
...Most of the colleagues whose wisdom I've sought claim not to be attracted to whips and chains and don't come much into contact with porn based on pleasure through brutality...
...Such a limited management may be feasible, I'm not sure...
...Anthony Burgess, himself a novelist, noted in an essay on pornography that "didactic works" like Mein Kampf and Das Kapital have had more influence than books "which merely represent life, no matter how onesidedly...
...In fact I admired her whole soliloquy for its uninhibited expressiveness...
...Elliott, for example, sees the danger to society as emanating from "erotic nihilists" like Henry Conversions (New York: Dutton, 1971), pp...
...a diversion or dream...
...Yet it is within the nature of social life to permit freedom in some areas and not others, to judge the cost of freedom and of its restrictions, and to make decisions about what social good may be served...
...a lift from a world of words and abstractions...
...Surely it is Epstein's moral indignation that causes her to say because we "are capable of deciding to teach Bellow and not Irving Wallace . . . we can decide to retain James Joyce and not Hustler...
...2 Obviously, these findings can have only an indirect impact on popular beliefs about pornography...
...But when I walk along 42nd Street in New York City and pass the peep-hole joints, the hard-core movie houses, the shabby bookstores, I find myself growing depressed...
...One's discomfort is increased by the recognition that such prosecutions gain legitimacy from our disgust with the daily encounter with pornography...
...We now require laws and attitudes that permit the once repressed drives "to reappear as themselves and come into their own equilibrium, according to organic selfregulation...
...4) Exposures to pornographic stimuli have little or no effect on "established attitudinal commitments regarding either sexuality or sexual morality...
...Civilization and trivialization may, in fact, be incompatible...
...Whom does it serve...
...But who, besides those who wished to be, have been instructed or persuaded by them...
...A colleague has even instructed me that the best way to watch a pornographic movie is alone...
...What are the further consequences of pornography...
...Given her common sense and feeling for life, had she seen Times Square as Mr...
...Joyce's Ulysses is often mentioned by defenders of pornography because Ulysses, too, was at one time prohibited...
...There were no quarrels among the people of the islands, I take it, as to the exact definition of pornography...
...Come off it...
...What ought to be done...
...Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...Research results by themselves no more inhibit attempts at censorships or legal prosecutions than scientific findings on race can by themselves eradicate prejudice and discrimination...
...Its connotation embraces art, science, philosophy, technology, social institutions—that complex social and cultural entity characteristic of a society or historical era...
...One is not good when he acts on a choice delegated to others...
...Neighborhoods are "slums," in part, because their inhabitants already have to contend with such social pollutants as prostitution and drugs, and some of the most exclusive and expensive neighborhoods of Manhattan overlook the smoke and brutal ugliness of Consolidated Edison's generating plants...
...Yet the vision conjured up by the notion of "civilization" engulfed by pornography further inflames the sense of outrage that justifies a readiness to take extreme measures...
...Radicals, if we are to include among them revolutionaries also, have in most instances been rather ascetic, and represented asceticism ideologically...
...Perhaps there's something to be said for an ounce of prevention in matters of the psyche...
...Nor does the proposal to zone pornography imply that the police will make the decisions in disputed instances...
...Because sex is treated in isolation from all other aspects of life, its representation is apprehended as having no pertinence to the totality of a person's experience...
...How limited is the independent power of art alone can be appreciated in our present situation...
...q 201 Cynthia Fuchs Epstein in the small Ohio city where I used to work, it was common knowledge that every month or so the American Legion would show "dirty" movies...
...Don Quixote, downtown of any contemporary American city...
...It is possible to argue, though, that in the current cultural situation it is difficult to conceive of the antipornography forces mustering strength to bring back "the bad old days" when D.H...
...In the long run a free and uninhibited flow of erotica would help demolish sexual repression and, ultimately, the need for pornography.3 Utopian essays, by definition, deal with the long range, but life is always lived in the short run...
...Using the power of the state to mitigate the effects of capitalism is an attempt to extend the range of freedom...
...I know that this opinion is respectable and that respectability has long been tarnished as bourgeois, but, like a good many other things that radicals dismiss as bourgeois, to sequester pornography, like sequestering prostitution, seems to me civilized, whether bourgeois or not, and to let pornography run rampant, as we now do, largely unrestrained and even condoned to the extent of allowing it to be advertised and discussed with approval in the public press, seems to me decadent, a classic instance of that license which is liberal excess...
...And I would accuse Mr...
...What of pornography that exploits the weak...
...Those who—like the Irving Kristols and Herbert Marcuses of this world—would invoke the law to repress what they do not like mistake the very nature of the goodness they affirm...
...It legitimates a set of attitudes for a public unfortunately prepared to subscribe to the notion that pain can be pleasure, particularly on the part of women...
...Whom does it harm...
...3 Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (New York: Random House, 1962), pp...
...Years ago 198 people would have been ashamed to be found reading Hustler, which now awaits you every time you visit the barber shop...
...196 tion," it is clear that "didactic works" like those of Masters and Johnson, The Joy of Sex, and the mountains of print produced by ardent feminists fiercely dedicated to changing the hearts and minds of women and men have exercised the critical influence...
...All of which prompts the questions, What can be done...
...It is a problem not unique to the distinction between pornography and other work...
...Persuasion transforms the ways of understanding oneself, the world about one, and the relationship between self and the world...
...We know, of course, that Molly Bloom had not seen Times Square or the George P. Elliott On the basic issues, I pretty much agree with Hausknecht...
...it raises no questions about the significance of sex in the life of individuals or society...
...Must we also attack the principle of equality...
...Take The Story of 0 and even the high art of Henry Miller, which the feminist community decries as debasing to women and evocative of ugly images regarding them...
...Abel is correct, therefore, in saying that when it is used in this global fashion without further specification no statement about it can be proven or disproven...
...Certainly it is one that is in line with most psychoanalytic thinking, with the outcry against any kind of inhibition, and with the high regard for everything low now favored in intellectual circles...
...But even if one were to grant that they undermine civilization and social institutions, the justification for censorship rests on grounds unacceptable to liberals and radicals...
...Can we safely ignore the American experience with laws designed to curb or eliminate prostitution, gambling, the sale and consumption of intoxicating beverages, the use of marijuana and other drugs, and the like...
...The courts deny it is rape if the husband forces sex on his wife...
...Kristol has inferred...
...It is historically demonstrable that the vast inequalities of capitalist society limit freedom, the ability to make choices...
...It is argued that censorship is dangerous because the censors are not qualified to make judgments...
...On a less Spenglerian level this translates into accusations that pornography On the Democratic Idea in America, (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 40...
...3, 1973...
...Apparently, this was their last—as it was their best—recourse against continuing ennui...
...No one studied what happened to those American Legionnaires in Ohio after their monthly meetings, but I can speculate on what investigators would have found...
...Whether pornography does have these far-reaching consequences is an empirical question, a difficult enough problem even without the assumption that an end to civilization is "inherently and purposefully" intended...
...The artist is most likely to have an effect when the didactic intent is controlled by and subordinated to aesthetic demands...
...it has promoted a general contempt for, and widespread disobedience of, law...
...In the deep background, then, are natural law theories that hold, in David Spitz's words (describing a position he does not himself accept), that freedom does not "involve a choice to act `wrongly...
...At this point in history, after all we have tasted of the age of totalitarianism, how can anyone suppose that the possible benefits of censorship could outweigh the probable dangers...
...Pornography doesn't originate these views but it does aid and abet them...
...55, 57...
...The National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which completed its work in 1970, sponsored a number of research studies ranging from the quasi-experimental to opinion surveys, and consequently we are in a better position than previously to deal with the empirical question...
...I don't have the faintest notion of what he can have in mind...
...And here we touch on what may be one of the deepest antinomies of the present order of things...
...Kristol has said is perfectly sound...
...This role finds law as the promoter of virtue, as a means to habituate to virtue . . . . "5 Or, as he put it in a later article, there is a "necessity for the law to make a modest effort to promote good character...
...29, no...
...We've all marched to ban the bomb and to prevent radioactive fall-out even though some scientists said it wasn't clear how much fallout was injurious to the health...
...And so, in spite of political prejudices, one begins to pay closer attention to the arguments that can be made for restrictions on pornography...
...This view, grounded in folk culture and a corrupted Freudian psychology, has serious and dangerous political overtones...
...5) There is no relation between criminal sex offenses, other forms of crime, and juvenile delinquency and the use of pornography...
...It is required, though, if social opinion lacks force, as it certainly does right now, to control pornography...
...Those without available partners or those who masturbate regularly show increases in masturbatory activity, but this too disappears within two days...
...Where will we find them...
...The pornographer concentrates on sex alone...
...Not only are we uncertain about the effects of pornography but, as Spitz suggests, the use of the law "inhibits . . . the free and responsible choice of right action...
...the tribesmen knew intuitively when and under what circumstances it was proper and even right to talk amusingly of sex...
...almost tribal, a prototypical ritual of collective conscience according to the gospel of Emile Durkheim...
...All the same, in the matter of what to do about pornography now, Hausknecht's case is my case...
...To put the matter baldly: art has an effect only when people are prepared to be affected...
...And coming closer to the present time, didn't we hear it said that Castro prohibited sex among the men and women fighting with him in the Sierra Maestra...
...Now when I first read the novel—it was in the early 30s—I did admire Molly Bloom's "dirty speech" and unconscious soliloquizing at the book's close...
...Categorization, no matter how clever we are, will always create "borderline instances where the categories are most unclear"—that is one foundation of the legal profession's prosperity...
...Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, The Report of the U.S...
...But there is a large business in pornography that depicts exploitation and brutalization of women, and men (though to a lesser degree...
...Today we experience an almost uninhibited flow of explicit material that is more pornographic than erotic, and it is more likely to raise our hackles than our hopes for the future...
...it is inconceivable that the widespread availability and use of pornography can have no effect on social institutions, the culture, and attitudes and behavior of people...
...No doubt censorship is a dangerous instrument, and one that has often been misused...
...Hausknecht means when he inveighs against the sexual displays on Times Square: such displays are not consistent with civilized life as we know it...
...If we ask what kind of writing has had the most effect on "the sexual revolu9 "What is Pornography," in Douglas A. Hughes, Perspectives on Pornography (New York: St...
...The distinctions must be made case-by-case, and this calls for magistrates of some sort, whether bureaucrats or, as I prefer, boards of censors...
...It offends many people, and in a particularly objectionable way, because some pornographic displays are often unavoidable...
...A final point...
...2 U.S...
...a way of touching base with their elemental being...
...The effect art can have in these circumstances is to support and perhaps accelerate changes already underway in the society and culture...
...Whatever power "erotic nihilists" can exercise rests on that function of art...
...As I interview people whose opinions I value on the perplexing problem of censorship and freedom and pornography, which led me to these series of reflections, I find that 202 some of my best male friends and colleagues (who are hardly Mr...
...Hausknecht asks, Where is the empirical evidence...
...If they were in fact models of most men, or if 95 percent (or 80 percent or 50 percent) of the legionnaires were like them, I could easily subscribe to unqualified freedom...
...Such legislation has not only been ineffectual...
...But on the other hand, the trivialization of the erotic is also barbarous, for the barbarian may be de199 scribed as the diminished man, the one whose experience of life (and sex) has been attenuated...
...Kristol has expressed the opinion that pornography is destructive of civilized life...
...Today I think less of it...
...But more is at work here than mere political opinion, for the radical also tends to be attracted to a position on pornography and erotica like that of Paul Goodman...
...They argue for license as freedom and contend that expression of sexuality in any form (save that which depicts and uses children) opens and expands the individual and collective opportunity structure...
...Now it was against such censorship that Goodman initiated his "dirty speech" campaign...
...But perhaps we shouldn't simplistically sentimentalize pornography as a positive expression of group solidarity...
...Just as the commitment to freedom of speech or due process of law means that we put up with a flow of ethnic and racial scurrilities and the occasional freeing of an obvious criminal, so too we must continue to contend with the burden of pornography...
...I don't think that even regression analysis will tell us whether the porn movies might have contributed to the events surmised above, or the drink, or the "we" spirit of the boys getting together without the women...
...Suppose it isn't true...
...Even if we accept these as meaningful terms of discourse, it is clear that what is not being enforced is only Abel's notion of what "social opinion" should be or Elliott's idea of what "decent custom" ought to be...
...The results must be accepted with more than the usual reservations, since the methodological difficulties of social-psychological research are compounded by the nature of the problem...
...It can be done, but doing so involves much more governmental machinery than he (or I) would like or than the ACLU thinks the First Amendment allows...
...Pornography is concerned only with sexual arousal...
...The cry, though, is or can be a prelude to a call for censorship, and the uneasiness that thought produces is reinforced by the reality of prosecutions against porno-film actors and the publisher of Hustler...
...To which, in turn, the usual answer is that a partial release of repressive mechanisms brings, not immediate health, but an outburst of the symptoms of the disease caused by the repression...
...If you want to go into one of those joints for $5 and see what you see and do what you do there, I don't propose to stop you...
...Beyond this we shall have to be satisfied with more limited goals...
...Most important, Hausknecht exaggerates the malignant power of censorship, as though any and every censorship were as bad as the totalitarian variety...
...Third, is not legislation that seeks to suppress or discourage pornography through heavy taxation intrinsically discriminatory...
...The anthropologist did not make it quite clear whether, when bored, they turned directly to stories and jokes about sex, or only after other efforts to raise their spirits had failed...
...Certainly it is not equal to the speeches of Cleopatra in Shakespeare, or of Phaedra in Racine's great play...
...One might even argue that when pornography is legalized and publicly offered, it is no longer offered in a form that serves the "weness" of community but rather contributes to alienation and anomie...
...Clever as we are, I think we can work out a way to differentiate between the pornography that is bad for our culture, ourselves and our families, and that which is a frolic into the world of sensuality or even a tolerable vulgarity...
...Members of the post would gather, and after the flag had been saluted and the padre had blessed the meeting and (ostentatiously) left the hall, all would settle down for an evening of beer and stag films...
...Many aspects of the good society entail decisions for less freedom and more restrictions...
...My disagreements with Hausknecht have to do with the complexity of the issues...
...The Legion practice in southern Ohio was probably not very different from that in other areas...
...The legitimacy of censorship, says Walter Berns, rests on "the positive role of law...
...The difference between a Robespierre and the rest of us is that he can and does use the power of the state to enforce his certainties...
...As far as I know, no social scientist has ever done community studies to see what are the consequences of porn experiences for the "normal population," outside a laboratory setting...
...By "erotic writing" or "erotica" I mean an explicit representation of sex within a context in which it is treated as part of the human experience and in which the sexual material is not used solely to stimulate arousal...
...toward the release of socially enforced repression, and what if then we still don't enter a time of shared health and well-being but instead witness a growth of the debasing, corrupt, inhumane values and tastes upon which pornography feeds...
...but let that pass...
...For what does it mean to be a person, a good person, if not that one himself chooses between good and evil, virtue and vice, truth and falsehood...
...So the very idea with which Goodman justified his promotion of "dirty speech" was that communications of this type were needed to undermine our "civilization" as Mr...
...Unlike pornography, art is concerned with exploring the relationships among people and their worlds with the aim of involving and moving the reader...
...so I WALK along 42nd Street and, seeing what one sees there, I remember Trotsky's expectation, at the end of his book Literature and Revolution, that mankind would yet rise to the levels of Goethe, Beethoven, and Marx._ It's not a program I find entirely attractive, nor is there much evident need to worry about it...
...Middle America in their intellect or taste) turn out to be porn-movie regulars...
...Before worrying about "what to do" with regard to pornography, I'd like to know a good deal more about it...
...We long for Goodman's prophecy of an end to repression to come true, but we worry about the consequences, between now and then, of the uncontrolled availability of pornography...
...They are not turned mean by exposure to pornography but are turned on or off to sexuality, depending on whether they've experienced the porn as "good" or "bad...
...9 Art does not mean to instruct or persuade, which is not to say that art cannot affect ideas and beliefs or that "books make no difference...
...Men and their brothers engaging in forbidden games, analogous to the secret societies in preliterate groups whose rituals serve to band men of maturity together, to initiate adolescent men to their ranks, and to set themselves apart from women...
...These sexual displays seem exclusively directed to making life seem worthless to anyone who still feels any kind of awe or reverence for it...
...Practices that underscore men's particularity, often to their hierarchical advantage...
...These antifeminist forces are reinforced by the zealous foes of pornography...
...You've seen the city: And I thought not them but someone else and I could never ask any of them with my eyes to ask again No and if anyone asked me I would say No to just say No and I would not put my arms around anyone or draw anyone down let no one feel my breasts No and let their hearts be fucking like mad and No I said No I will not No one of the supreme stories, would not be as it is unless Cervantes had worked under a Most Catholic censorship, and to imagine that he would have told that story better had he been unrestrained is mere liberal fantasy—other, yes, but not better...
...My guess is that democratic societies probably have no choice but to go along with this outlook, ragged as it is and uncertain as we may be about its premises...
...But, he continues, we are living in a period of transition, a time when ideas about sex are breaking though the barriers of repression...
...What is interesting about the writer is that he has not joined the chorus of those who find modern Western civilization too "repressive" for their taste—Tierno rightly finds it antiascetic and, as a consequence, trivializing...
...When a city like New York tries to attract tourists as a great place to visit it encourages the trade in pornography...
...But the power is easily exaggerated...
...He also proposes the opinion that true art does not instruct or persuade...
...This Robespierre beneath the skin peeks out at us in the comments of Abel, Cynthia Epstein, and George P. Elliott...
...It is not considered a limitation of one's personal freedom to be denied the right to freely express anger and hatred of a type that is detrimental to the health of society...
...He leaves unmentioned what I take to be a self-evident fact, that any healthy society, including one as libertarian as ours, protects itself against such outrages against what it holds to be decent custom as public pornography...
...Similarly, Epstein knows what is "detrimental to the health of a society" and does not hesitate to list "the decisions for less freedom and more restrictions" needed for "the good society...
...But all one really need assume about the poor hack scribbling away is that he hopes someone will become excited...
...Such arduous tasks require censors of unusual quality and diligence, and very many of them to boot...
...In phenomenological terms, behavioral change requires a new construction of reality...
...One is overcome by a sense that the texture of public life has become coarsened and that some natural boundary between public and private worlds is being wantonly violated by a barrage of pornography...
...Feminists, for example, worry about the image of women that pornography encourages, and sometimes find themselves unsympathetic to traditional civil liberties arguments and utopian visions...
...The association of sex with brutal violence, the ideologizing of sadomasochism, the reduction of love to snickering mechanics, the fixation upon bodily organs that in their photographic enlargement can seem as disgusting as Swift said they were—all these point to some profound derangement of life that no one, to my knowledge, has fully explained as yet...
...And some, (we are discovering this with alarming frequency) may have drunkenly beaten the wives who wouldn't...
...cit., p. 164...
...So Kristol is convinced that it undermines civilization, while a novelist and critic like George P. Elliott believes that pornography is an attack on "society as such" because it subverts the institution of the family.4 Such propositions often rest on a philosophical justification of censorship...
...We are capable of deciding to teach Bellow and not Irving Wallace in a course on the modern novel and surely we can decide to retain James Joyce and not Hustler...
...Outside their fields, they often express fury about bad films, theater, art, and home decoration...
...Yet what of the pornographic literature and media that bears a message of inequality and exploitation...
...by comparison, maintaining a red-light district is simple...
...No doubt in esthetic discussions true art does not...
...Lawrence and Henry Miller were under-the-counter items...
...They would impose their "right" morality on others, but—even if their morality is "right," which is surely contestable—they forget that law as a means of coercion does not ensure but inhibits the truly moral act, which is the free and responsible choice of right action...
...a glance at a record shop window discloses an album-cover photograph, reproduced on a rooftop billboard, of a bound woman, while a nearby movie marquee promotes the dubious delights of an X-rated movie featuring children...
...One argument, just a step or two removed from a knee-jerk puritanism, is the reiteration of the traditional stereotypes of a direct relationship between pornography and unacceptable behavior—e.g., a viewing of Deep Throat encourages promiscuity...
...Restrictions on anything resembling freedom of speech and thought obviously touch the most deep-seated sentiments of liberals and radicals...
...his own society (first under the Monarchy, then under the Revolution except for a brief period during the Terror, then under the first Empire) saw him as an enemy and so treated him and his writings...
...To say that pornography and erotic writing endanger institutions is to say that they affect beliefs and opinion about the proper way to organize social relationships, about the appropriate means for accomplishing the tasks necessary to maintain society...
...For one thing, he does not deal with the difficulty of sequestering mass-distributed pornography—books, magazines, movies, 200 television...
...Will this do more than deny it only to the poor...
...Brecht, no doubt, has affected individuals, but surely they were not instructed by him in Marxist doctrine or persuaded to membership in the Communist party...
...No rules can be formulated that will guide lawenforcement officers...
...I believe that words and pictures have power...
...I doubt very much if there is any kind of Puritanism now extant that can be properly so characterized...
...Apparently Mr...
...Hausknecht of knee-jerk reactions to anything said by Irving Kristol, even when what Mr...
...There is the not so bad old stuff such as Fannie Hill and the work of Frank Harris, there is "literature" such as Lady Chatterly's Lover...
...In cities that have escaped the blight of urban renewal there are residential neighborhoods overlapping these districts...
...195 Miller whose work has "literary value .. . enough to redeem its pornography but not enough to make one ignore its destructive intent...
...As Murray Hausknecht points out, there is porn, and there is porn that is erotica...
...Those who would deny him that choice, who insist instead that he forsake his reason and his right to free decisionmaking and place his conscience into their custody, demand that he cease to be a mature and responsible individual...
...pornography fails: the construction of a new social reality is founded on social discourse while pornography is solely concerned with sexual intercourse...
...I n the absence, then, of empirical evidence and plausible arguments one must remain skeptical of the presumed long-run consequences of pornography and erotica...
...It is of course a familiar stratagem, perhaps derived from our Puritan heritage, to seek to exorcise an evil by legislating against it...
...Here, I think, one has to be certain of one's values rather than of any particular set of facts...
...to do so is to commit the crime of libel...
...3) Established patterns of sexual behavior are not significantly altered by exposure to pornography...
...But it is one thing to omit Irving Wallace from a course on the modern novel and another to bring the full majesty of the law against Hustler...
...To say that "society is nonexistent" is to assume that mere anarchy rules and then, "of course," there must be "legal action against pornography...
...If, however, we do not accept such traditional beliefs about sex, then the mere fact that pornography stimulates sexual excitement cannot, by itself, be grounds for condemnation...
...A nasty business all around...
...Is this what humanity, or even a portion of it, has come to in the late years of the 20th century...
...I think that Murray Hausknecht is speaking for all these trends when he tells us that radicals naturally tend to protest against inhibitions of any kind...
...The movies seen by my academic friends turn out to be not bad politically...
...1) Pornography is offensive...
...Second, does legislation in matters of morality produce significant compliance...
...And (2), in the Trobriand Island cultures, references to sex were allowable under particular conditions subject to social opinion...
...Whatever values and attitudes toward sex a person brings to reading or viewing of pornography remains unchallenged by that experience...
...I fear the point of view that is insensitive to the implications of the pornography that is grounded in society's tolerance of brutality toward women or men...
...But those who question the qualifications of the censors—and who deny that anyone is qualified to censor—exercise standards of judgment in their everyday lives and indeed often make their living by making judgments...
...By the very nature of the task they are likely to be, as Milton argued, second- or third-rate minds, "illiterate and illiberal individuals" who will refuse their sanction to any work containing views or expressions at all above the level of "the vulgar superstition...
...For them, in varying degrees, porn is a voyage into erotica...
...We know, after all, that what is functional for the ingroup may precipitate antagonisms to the out-group...
...Where, then, do evil and presumption reside...
...Because I am for nonsexist terminology in text books and against the media presentation of black men and women as shuffling, illiterate, lazy and inept, or of Jews as crafty and avaricious, I am also against porn movies, television programs, and magazines that portray women—and men as victims who love their victimization...
...It seems to me that he finds the whole matter so distasteful that he simplifies it unrealistically...
...But against this mere assertion of fact, there is the plausible argument that neither pornography nor erotic writing can have the effects claimed for them...
...207 Bringing state power to bear on a phenomenon like pornography is an entirely different matter...
...The artist has to contend not only with Robespierre but with the urge to teach...
...Still, with all their limitations, the findings seem to justify the following propositions: (1) Exposure to pornographic materials produces sexual arousal "in substantial proportions of males and females...
...164-65...
...But the whole question of the relationship between artist and censorship is too intricate to go into here...
...193 causes a breakdown in sexual morals and the family, and encourages juvenile delinquency, sex crimes, and other perversions...
...These same persons, who deny any right to judge the presentation of sexual matter, impose standards of excellence in English composition, piano playing, or research techniques in their own fields...
...Some probably managed to supress their aroused urges and some probably were put straight to bed, victims of the evening's beer...
...Now the kind of pornography we encounter while walking through Times Square, and in the downtown areas of most American cities—quite well described, by the way, though with insufficient indignation, by Murray Hausknecht—has no relation whatever to any positive life value to which I, or Mr...
...But people are offended by many things, and unless it can be shown that a distasteful item or practice adversely affects their interests and not merely their sentiments, or stands in a necessary (causal) relationship to criminal conduct, or seriously impairs rather than marginally troubles a community's quality of life—none of which (with respect to pornography) has yet been conclusively demonstrated—we should hesitate to meet that practice by censorship and other legal 205 sanctions rather than by moral and social disapprobation...
...From which we may learn two things: (1) There are life-enhancing as well as lifedestroying ways of referring to sex, and the sexual act...
...But it doesn't begin to get at the deeper problem, the endlessly depressing question of why so many people yield themselves to the wretched stuff...
...Kristol can of course speak for himself, but when he says pornography is destructive of civilization he may have meant merely precisely what Mr...
...There can surely be no serious return to older modes of repression, denial or even discipline—to speak of a return to Victorianism is to indulge in a fantasy or, at best, a metaphor...
...But I see no reason why I or my kids should be forced to look, when we walk along the streets, at the stuff that delights you and disgusts me...
...After all, the attraction of the metropolis always has 197 been the promise of pleasures unavailable at home...
...But evil is not easily or always eradicated by political fiat, and the use of legal instrumentalities may introduce still greater evils...
...This evokes a picture analogous to the old stereotype of the bearded anarchist gleefully working on the bombs that will destroy the regime...
...5 Freedom, Virtue and the First Amendment (Chicago: Henry Regenry Co.—Gateway Edition, 1965), p. 240...
...Pornography is also accused of other evils, as in Irving Kristol's pronouncement that "pornography . . . is inherently and purposefully subversive of civilization and its institutions...
...I don't know what damage, if any, it does to society or the future generations...
...his works, of which pornography is an essential ingredient, are powerful antisocial, immoral weapons...
...Agreed...
...In fact, the assertion is quite false...
...and it has in unacceptable ways invaded the realm of privacy...
...Hausknecht, for that matter, could point...
...to do so is to commit the crime of assault...
...Heterosexual materials rather than homosexual or sadomasochistic materials are more significant in producing arousal...
...The trend is certainly toward trivialization, but this trend, too, can pass...
...Now one of the most important effects of pornography is to trivialize the erotic...
...Why should men, even the "rejects" of our society, find pleasure in all this...
...Its presence is most apparent when the writer surrenders to it and we know precisely what it is we are being instructed in and persuaded to...
...We do not know much about the answers...
...Pornography is usually condemned because it is equated with obscenity, that which is dirty, shameful, and degrading...
...194 they encourage self-censorship and caution among publishers and producers who are not a notably courageous lot...
...That my tastes and behavior are a measure of civilization is a powerfully attractive idea, but I fear that it is the road to madness and, politically speaking, concedes too much to the Robespierre within us all...
...An acceptance of the givenness of the world is a necessary condition for successful pornography, since the presumed pleasures to be derived from the representations of intercourse are hard to come by if one is distracted by discourse on the meaning and significance of human sexuality...
...One may not strike another person...
...It was not the aristocrats of England who closed down the theaters in the 17th century...
...Objecting, Mr...
...Which side were we on...
...A term like "civilization" as used by Irving Kristol refers to something more than Abel's standards of civility in human relationships...
...Now the question is naive...
...163-243...
...Additionally, he makes much too neat a division between pornography and "erotic" art...
...q 206 Murray Hausknecht A Rejoinder Lionel Abel seems to suggest that, if only I were more indignant, the way he and I react to Times Square could be taken as a standard of "civilized life as we know it...
...If this is so, the case for unlimited pornographic expression has some merit...
...Still, the argument for censorship doesn't seem persuasive...
...he takes the everyday world in which sexual behavior occurs as given and unproblematic...
...We can limit the location and number of establishments dealing solely with pornography...
...Does anyone remember Prohibition...
...In this sphere the power of the state limits human freedom rather than enhancing it...
...This last he lays up to the current trend to antiasceticism...
...This simplistic view is modified by a second argument: findings like those of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography overlook the long-range consequences...
...Many otherwise responsible citizens have opposed such community measures as mandatory schooling, innoculation, fluoridation of the water, and prohibitions on dumping of raw sewage into public water...
...But, whatever the best answer, Hausknecht evades the whole question...
...Even when she is less certain—"without knowing just how much pornography is to blame, but suspecting its impact" she is prepared to employ the full power of the state against it...
...that is, it can be used simply for the purposes of arousal...
...However, erotica can be converted by the reader into pornography...
...In effect, being moved by a work of art means entering into discourse with "another" social reality, and such discourse can make our reality problematic...
...Good sense demands that when we consider the latter possibility we first carefully attend to the kind of questions suggested by David Spitz rather than the demonic action of a Robespierre...
...Can nothing be done, then, to secure ourselves against the daily offense of pornography...
...it is a low, bad, unclean art, but an art that is of some intrinsic power and is sometimes put to the service of a vile persuasion...
...Martin's Press, 1970), p. 5. This anthology also contains versions of the Goodman and Elliott articles...
...Yet, one may ask, how truly related are the factors in this presumed causal relationship...
...Hausknecht has referred to "knee-jerk" Puritan reactions...
...Hausknecht and I have seen it, she would, I believe, have expressed herself quite differently at the end of Ulysses...
...Such legal actions have a "chilling effect" on free speech...
...For most people pornography is like the noxious stink of a glue factory, and just as we locate the factory away from homes so we can zone to restrict our public encounters with pornography...
...The prevalent liberal assumption has been that pornography is a by-product of repression, sexuality twisted and sickened into pathology...
...But if it can be said that under certain circumstances they turned to pornography— the word "pornography" is perhaps not quite applicable here—in any case it must be noted that they did not contribute to the advancement of any specialists in pornography...
...One reason we tend to overlook these questions is our readiness to use the power of the state to deal with the evils arising from capitalist economic institutions...
...But this location has always had similar disadvantages...
...the idea of zoning suggests a different body...
...The following articles are based on a recent discussion among our editors, led by Murray Hausknecht, on the topic of pornography in our society and the ensuing problems of social and cultural climate—and civil liberties...
...Our ability to make judgments is not the issue...
...It was as American as motherhood and apple pie...
...2) Continued exposure to pornography results in satiation of arousal and interest...
...Certainly they did not aid forces destructive of their society every time they felt tired of life and looked to stories or jokes about sex to help them back into it...
...but, if you are going to sequester, you must have someone to say "this is to be sequestered, that not," and under this necessity I think citizens' committees less likely to abuse their power than minor bureaucrats...
...In any case, who knows...
...Is it not enough to torture the limits of liberty...
...He is the extreme case, and though, as Burgess says, no novelist is as efficacious as Hitler or Marx, Sade is efficacious enough to be worrisome...
...These are political questions, and censorship would prohibit exposure to a full range of politically relevant perspectives...
...Hausknecht, who would rather not censor literature or displays because they think censorship itself uncivilized...
...And I would give one more argument...
...If censorship is really to work—and here I urge a rereading of Milton's Areopagiticathe censors must begin by cataloguing and proscribing all scandalous works already in print, prohibit the importation of all foreign writings until they have been examined and approved, expurgate those works that are partly useful and excellent and partly pernicious, and require all new materials to be submitted prior to publication...
...Even when the effect may be observed by direct measurement of physiological changes, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle complicates matters: the instrumentation measuring sexual arousal tends to inhibit response...
...He minimizes the power of pornography...
...We can hardly subject civilizations to controlled experiment so as to determine their tolerance or intolerance of pornographic displays and obscene literature...
...But there seems 204 in recent decades to have occurred a decline in social repression, yet the interest in pornography has visibly grown...
...Or do they find pleasure...
...Similarly, the use of children in pornographic movies can and ought to be prosecuted under child abuse laws...
...2) Censorship is even more offensive...
...There are also the X-rated movies in sections such as New York's 42nd Street, the monthly perusal of Playboy, a skim of Penthouse at the barber's, and glances at the covers of Hustler and similar magazines at the news stand...
...No one in the community, not even their wives or parents, openly objected...
...To defend censorship is to assume that existing social arrangements represent the best of all possible worlds, or, since we already know what the proper relationships among people ought to be, citizens need not be distracted by wrong and incorrect views...
...This is an argument hard to check, impossible to refute...
...Obviously, if Elliott is correct, it is erotic writing rather than pornography that subverts "society as such...
...6 "Pornography and Democracy: The Case for Censorship," Public Interest, Winter 1971, p. 14...
...Is that to be our destiny...
...Others may have mused through the week about that pert waitress in the diner who is always really "asking for it anyway" and may have tried a tickle or some remarks...
...But even if an artist has no didactic intention, I believe—though I cannot demonstrate with sociological surveys, I believe, as most societies believe, hence the restrictions they erect—I believe that the effect of art may be not purely and tidily esthetic but also moral, obscurely, remotely, unprovably moral, modifying attitudes and thereby behavior...
...Elliott is correct, of course, in pointing out that I ignored some difficulties in the proposal to zone pornography...
...One may not falsely accuse another person to his or her detriment...
...By pornography I mean any written or visual representation of sexual behavior— explicitly and vividly presented—whose sole intent is sexual arousal...
...However, we can infer from findings of the 1970 Commission on Pornography that some, sexually aroused, mated with their wives with renewed vigor...
...But actual art in the real world often does...
...it has contributed to (if not encouraged and perhaps required) the growth of organized crime, including smuggling, the black market, and police corruption...
...3) Therefore, let us protect society at large, not by forbidding public pornography outright, but by sequestering it...
...Who shall judge, they ask, and in the next moment they are judging the worthiness of a political candidate, the system of Justice in the U.S., or when it became decent to travel in Spain or buy a Volkswagen...
...Those prejudiced in favor of freedom must reject anything that interferes with people's right to free political choice...
...Government Printing Office, 1970), pp...
...Sociologist Ned Polsky informs me that the incidence of child molestation went down in Denmark with the ending of all restrictions on pornography...
...It has created classes of criminals where none existed before...
...humans, if nothing else, are clever, distinction-making, categorizing beings...
...Still, he may be overstating some of these difficulties...
...Which isn't to say that certain modes of social protection might not be considered...
...On the other hand, not withstanding the recent and rapid changes in attitudes toward sex, these very changes contribute to the strength of the antiabortion movement and the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment...
...The idea expressed by Paul Goodman (he is cited on this very point by Murray Hausknecht) that our civilization is sexually repressive conveys, to me at least, the implication that the maintenance of our civilization requires the censorship of pornography...
...First, who will be the censors—an elegant word for petty bureaucrats—who will distinguish "obscene" from acceptable literature (books, magazines, films, plays, etc...
...q Lionel Abel Malinowski, writing some years back on the sexual life of savages, told us that when nothing else could stimulate them, the natives of the Trobriand Islands often told sexual jokes...
...Throughout, it is to be understood that what is said about "writing" applies also to movies...
...Even if one only believes that the present arrangements are more bearable than what would result from the unrestricted availability of pornography, our historical experience suggests that censorship more often than not kills what it is ostensibly designed to protect...
...All the same it remains an extraordinary outpouring of thoughts and feelings...
...Lurking within all of us, however, is a willingness to impose, given half a chance, our certainties on others...
...It may be useful to recall some of these potential (I think highly probable) dangers...
...Whom does it help...
...The Marquis announced himself an enemy of society...
...Sade and Pound, who in the Cantos instructs us on Social Credit policies and tries to persuade us to a hatred of Jews, are cases in point...
...Murray Hausknecht fears that protests against pornographic literature and shows might lead to a censorship that would also be directed against more genuine kinds of communication...
...He is not an ascetic himself, and he is not in favor of asceticism—he wants us to accept our destiny, which, as he sees the matter, must necessarily take the form of antiasceticism and trivialization...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
